Martin’s Blog

I’m on the search for new ideas for apps to write for the iPhone just for enjoyment - something I can whip up in an afternoon would be nice.

I’ve just had an idea, but I’m not sure if there’s something similar already floating around…

The basic idea goes something along the lines of hide and seek with strangers. Someone may leave a message (paper or some other physical thing), object or anything, open the app and mark the objects location. The user could then write a few clues and post it to the server. Following this, anyone within a given radius could be sent a clue to where the prize/message is. I think it would be pretty fun to play!

The idea came about when I thought about how Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails used Google Maps to mark where he had hidden some concert tickets for fans to find. I believe there’s some sort of similar concept on an episode of Numb3rs.

I think it would be pretty hard to get the idea to take off, and there may be some problems that always come with user submitted content but there’s opportunity.

Whilst listening to my iPod on the train to work today, I had an idea, albeit probably not applicable to the iPod.

The basic story goes that, I’d say most people like to listen to different genres of music at different times. Unless you have a restricted musical taste, you probably like at least a few genres of music, and usually you like to listen to them on different occasions. I think the genre and mood of the music you like to listen to reflect what’s going on in your life and how you feel at that particular moment.

Due to the fact that we express how we feel through facial expressions and our actions, a computer could theoretically detect how you’re feeling. I know this isn’t the whole story, but nothings black and white.

So my idea is that, through using say a webcam (a Mac with an iSight would be ideal), we could combine facial recognition and emotion detection algorithms to form smart playlists that relates to your mood. This could even be combined with Genius in iTunes to form a set of songs that go well together and express your mood at the same time. I see the emotion detection algorithms being adaptive, relying on the image processing but also user input e.g. if the user chooses to skip a given song.

There are obviously some technical and privacy issues. The first technical issue being that image processing is very processor intensive, however with machines of the future having tens of cores, this may not be such a problem. Many users may also not want a computer detecting how they feel, or attempting to.

Now if only my iTunes COM interface worked properly I’d start coding it!

Much has happened since my last post, and I didn’t keep up the blogging – no shock there.

I managed to get my hands on a mint condition iMac for a very good price, it’s the model just before they made them silver. Nice little thing, the iMac, it would be nice to ditch the PC but it would be too expensive to replace with the equivalent Mac.

The first day of getting the Mac up and running saw me install Synergy and the iPhone SDK, everything I shall ever need for the Mac! Synergy is a pretty handy app, albeit a little painful to setup and install. This allows me to keep my desk clear and use the keyboard on my Windows machine to develop on the Mac too.

Within a few days development had begun on MovieStar (checkout my project page) – my native IMDb search tool. Prior this point I had no experience with Cocoa or Objective-C, besides the fact that I’d only used Mac’s occasionally. The first few weeks of getting to grips with the new language and development environment were hard, but the odd syntax gradually came to me.

The link between the Interface Builder and the code was a little hard to fathom at first, where if you accidently connect the wrong components or outlets the app just crashes with little clue as to why. This brings me on to XCode’s error handling – what’s going on there? The majority of crashes give you NO error message at all, XCode just starts up GDB and shrugs.

XCode isn’t all bad though, if you look past the fact you can’t rename a project easily. The API look up tool is pretty handy and I do like the code auto completion, although it’s a little hard to get used to coming from Netbeans and similar tools.

Expect to see MovieStar on the AppStore at the end of September of sometime in October – I hope!